Home of the Rabbit that Bites People's Heads Off and Eddie Izzard's Evil Giraffe

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Out of Sight...

I knew this was going to happen. I knew that when Haditha made the news again, there would be wave upon wave of bloviation from people who cannot accept that the mission in Iraq is failing fast. Bill O'Reilly tried to go the route of, "Oh, we've always done this," by reversing the facts of the Malmedy massacre and dishonoring dead soldiers. Michelle Malkin claimed that Hamas is training children to handle weapons, which apparently exonerates US troops from killing an entire family execution style.

But the worst of them, the print description of, "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEEEARRR YOU!", comes from Glenn Reynolds. Here's what he has to say about this coverage:

Peter Ingemi writes that the antiwar left has made Haditha morally irrelevant:

["]There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody.

Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting “Hadithas” over and over again over the last three years.

Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.

Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we’ve done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don’t wish on any of us.["]

Neither do I.

Just in case that wasn't clear...

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

So, basically, what Reynolds is saying is that, if we draw attention to people behaving in an atrocious and uncivilized manner, and excoriate them for such through the media to the extent of our abilities, then we will reinforce the message that, apparently, it's an okay thing to do because nobody cares. Yeah, I'm kinda confused, too.

This is all simple, really. Throw away all the historical errors and half-assed justification and psuedosociological claptrap. What happened here is simple: people like Glenn Reynolds did not want Haditha to happen, because it makes what they stand for look bad. And they can't have that, so they try to get rid of it.

And they have the fucking gall to say that we're weak-willed enough to be adversely influenced by this shit?